(no subject)
Someone gave me 12 months of LJ! Thanks, someone! Can I do something nice for you? SV porn, perhaps? (It's occurred to me that this may have happened a while ago, and the notification might be part of the apparent release of long-delayed comments also happening now, in which case I'm really sorry I didn't know before.)
I learned one very important thing from my most recent story: When in doubt, break furniture. Mostly my feedback is varied and singles out different parts of a story, but this time every single person who said anything specific liked the impromptu office redecoration.
Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club: Fowler, occasionally an sf writer, has gotten a lot of press for this book, which follows the lives of five women and one man who meet to discuss Jane Austen's books over the course of several months. While the club is in existence, they experience divorce, death, new love, and various other life-changing events, and it's those events that they bring to Austen. As an illustration of how no one really ever reads the same book as anyone else, the conceit works very well - and is complemented by a selection of statements about Austen from writers famous and obscure collected at the end of the book. There are some nice character descriptions, and Fowler is never heavy-handed - life events contrast to the book being read in any given month, but only in a way that reflects on both rather than creating simple parallels. As usual, I wanted more plot, where "plot" is defined as involving either aliens or murder, preferably both. Nonetheless, the book is a smooth read, a real love letter to those who love reading - with a few inside-baseball-type moments commenting on the sf world.
Stephen Dedman, Shadowsbite: The subtitle is "A Magic Noir Thriller." Yeah, Dedman wishes. There's a stuntman and a mage, and they get involved in something that has to do with vampires. I found it incoherent and uninteresting.
Christopher Golden, The Boys Are Back in Town: Right before his high school reunion, Will James gets a call from an old friend and makes plans to see him at the reunion. But when he gets there, everybody thinks the friend is dead, has been since high school, and Will suddenly has two sets of memories, one of which agrees with everybody else. Then more things start to change, always for the worse, and Will and his childhood friend might be the only ones who can stop it - if their earlier experiments with magic aren't actually the cause. While there's certainly plenty of pedestrian stuff in here, I enjoyed the plot, and there were some sharply observed moments, particularly at the reunion itself. Golden made me believe that men who hadn't seen each other in ten years but had been thicker than thieves in high school would talk exactly like this to each other.
Mildred Ames, Anna to the Infinite Power: I reread this because geekturnedvamp made me a copy of the movie, which was one of my childhood favorites. It's a YA sf novel about a not-very-nice girl who discovers that there's another girl who looks just like her and has the same name. Then she discovers that she's actually a clone of a brilliant scientist who died before finishing her most important invention, and she's being raised in conditions attempting to replicate the first Anna's - except that the first Anna was a Holocaust survivor, which might have something to do with Anna's disturbing dreams. There's also a new neighbor, a music teacher, who insists on making Anna do things that she doesn't want to; she seems to have some agenda, though the book never explains that agenda while the movie does. Both book and movie have very depressing, though somewhat different, endings - I wonder whether a similar ending would be as easy to sell today. The movie was fun for nostalgia purposes (that 80s hair!), but, as geekturnedvamp reminded me, the real charge in the movie comes from the extremely intense relationship between Anna and her brother. There's a scene that plays as nothing other than courtship - and of course Anna isn't really biologically related to her "brother," though nobody explicitly points this out. And the brother's crush on the music teacher - well, let's just say that it doesn't decrease the subtext one whit. Those things are present in the book to lesser degree (the "courtship" scene is a lot less romantic, for example), though I never noticed either one as a child.
Jeff Long, Year Zero: Graverobbing at Golgotha unleashes a deadly plague on the world. The unwitting architects of humanity's doom, meanwhile, continue to Tibet, where a literal falling-out leaves one in jail and the other free to continue his path of destruction. Meanwhile (the temptation to add "back at the ranch" is irresistable), a young genius has her genetically engineered monster ripped away from her. As the archeologist begins a monumental trek home to find his young daughter, the genius becomes a key figure in the fight against the plague, and her Frankenstein skills are employed in a desperate measure -- cloning the dead of Golgotha, one of whom just might be the Christ. The back cover plays up the Jesus angle, presumably to capture the attention of the Left Behind crowd, but it's really not like that at all. The narrative doesn't take a stand on whether the plague is really God's punishment, or just a disease from which humanity has lost its immunity, but the implausibility of the male protagonist being present at so many key moments (and what's with the Neandertal, anyhow?) argues for either divine will or authorial fiat. The woman, who is supposed to be a natural leader, at one point misses a fairly obvious indication of a horrible thing one of her adversaries is about to do, and in general we're told about her magnetism and leadership more than shown it. But you weren't looking for characterization, were you? This is an end of the world narrative, Big Death and End of Days stuff, without that pesky Left Behind conservatism. Still, the end seemed to fizzle to me; I can't say exactly why I was disappointed, especially given some of the episodes, like the refugees seeking Alaska on a ship of the damned and some trenchant observations about Americans' certainty that they will be saved. Maybe it's just that the two central characters could never quite convince me to care. Both of them start out as not very nice people -- the man a dupe and the woman/girl a Mengele in the making -- and perhaps we're supposed to think that suffering ennobles them, makes them heroes when they would have been monsters in another timeline. Certainly their actions redeem them. Am I just upset that there wasn't enough angst? Possibly. Anyway, this could probably help you survive a boring waiting room -- as long as you're not too worried about potential blasphemy.
Jonathan Kellerman, A Cold Heart: Any Alex Delaware novel is pretty much like the others. Here, the child psychologist is out of his main area of expertise, dealing with a serial killer who seems to like up-and-coming artists, while also dealing with his recent breakup with his longtime lover and a promising new relationship; those were the boring parts. Petra Connor, a female detective, and her weird new partner Eric Stahl also get a bunch of page time, introducing POVs with which Kellerman seems somewhat less confident. Both Alex and Petra think a lot about clothes and appearance, which makes sense for LA (and, I guess, for cops, but more for LA). I liked the abnormal child psychology ones better, but as airplane reading it's acceptable.
Harlan Coben, No Second Chance. Dr. Marc Seidman, shot by person or persons unknown, wakes to find his wife dead and his daughter missing. There's a ransom demand, but things go terribly wrong, and he loses yet another person. Eighteen months later, his lost love drops back into his life -- and he receives a second ransom demand. Is there a connection? And what about his former neighbor, in whose house he now lives, who keeps returning to see the place where she was horribly abused? There's enough frenetic action in this one to keep you from noticing the cardboard characterizations, and I actually liked the investigating officers, minor though their roles were. Again, airplane reading.
Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!: In need of some comfort reading last week, I picked up this Night Watch book, in which we meet a drunken Captain Sam Vimes and a young dwarf, six feet tall, newly arrived in the city to join the Night Watch. He's got a very ordinary, not magical at all sort of sword, and a birthmark; he's a human orphan, raised as a dwarf by the dwarf king; and his name is Carrot. But the story, like all the Night Watch stories, belongs to Vimes, as he is jerked out of his drunken, depressed torpor by a series of fiery deaths, apparently caused by the reappearance of dragons, long thought extinct. Indeed, the dragon has been summoned by a secret society, so that a suitable young man can slay the dragon and prove his worthiness to be king, because Ankh-Morpork hasn't had a king in a long time, and certain people think that's too bad. If you don't know Pratchett, you should, and if you do, my words are poor substitutes. I like the Night Watch books best of all the Discworld books because they feature heroes, by which I mean cranky, flawed, obstreperous, and thoroughly wonderful people who do things because they're right, not because they're easy or fun. (Also of interest here is the brief cameo by Detritus, before induction into the Watch.)
Sharon Shinn, Angelica: Shinn writes sf romances, the most successful of which are about Samaria, the planet colonized by people under the tutelage of Jovah/Yovah, the god who's a spaceship and who responds to the songs of angels by providing what the people need. This novel takes us back, earlier in the history of Samaria than the initial trilogy, to the time of Gaaron, an Archangel-to-be who is instructed by the god to take Susannah, a nomad woman, as his wife. Susannah isn't thrilled about leaving her lover and her tribe for life inside the rock eyrie of the angels, and Gaaron has other troubles - his rebellious half-sister at home and, even worse, the obliteration of small settlements by mysterious forces wielding devastating weapons. The characters, annoying and sympathetic, are all doing their best by their own lights - no evil overlords here, just real conflict - and I really liked the romance because there were real divisions between Susannah and Gaaron, cultural and perhaps gendered divisions that weren't easily resolved. They had some misunderstandings, but they weren't silly about them - they actually talked, though they didn't always agree at the end of the conversations and they didn't even always clear up those misunderstandings. I was rooting for them, and Shinn delivered a satisfying conclusion without any emotional shortcuts; while the sf part of the plot was more mechanical, I remain interested in Samaria and its god-fearing people.
Linda Nagata, The Bohr Maker: coffee_and_ink turned me on to Nagata. This is my first book of hers, but it won't be the last. The Bohr Maker is a genetic - well, virus comes close; a person carrying the Bohr Maker can do things to her own and others' bodies, reshaping them, controlling their emotions, etc. For this reason, the Bohr Maker is banned by the world government, which stringently controls all genetic modification technology. Nikko, a genetically modified space-dweller whose modification is now illegal and who is going to die because of that, plots to get the Bohr Maker, but through a series of mishaps it ends up with Phousita, an illiterate slum-dweller in Asia. Chased relentlessly by the police, including a real Dragon Lady who likes to torment Nikko, Phousita, Nikko, and Nikko's brother must figure out how to survive. The Dragon Lady is an annoying character, since we never get any insight into why she's such a raging bitch and so she comes off as a plot device with big flashing arrows saying "hate me; hope I get my comeuppance." But Phousita is an interesting and unusual character. Even though her transformation is more told than shown, and even though the Bohr Maker suffers from the Superman problem of being able to do almost anything, which is rough on narrative tension, it's such a fascinating journey that I was forgiving.
Orson Scott Card, Shadow Puppets: Another novel in Card's Ender Wiggins universe, this one focusing on Bean and his inamorata Petra as they attempt to survive the machinations of the psychotic Achilles. This book was pretty much spoiled for me by Card's gender/sexuality theories. Everyone - no matter their cultural backgrounds - seems to agree that the job of a man is to father children and the job of a woman to mother, that these are very different jobs, that this is the highest goal to which anyone can aspire, even those who have in earlier life saved the world, and that there is no rational reason to think otherwise. Now, it's not that this is an implausible viewpoint - my sister seems to hold it, so I know there exist people like this. What is implausible is that everyone in Card's world, from the German homosexual scientist to the various kids from around the world who were part of Ender Wiggin's jeesh, finds this self-evident (with the brief exception of Bean, before he capitulates, despite the fact that nobody has actually answered his legitimate objections to this position - his genes guarantee a short and painful life for any child of his in whom they're dominant -- and despite the fact that Petra deliberately disregards his wishes with regard to reproduction, leading to a series of events that somebody should have seen as disastrous rather than just another damn thing to deal with). This is poor characterization of a nominally multicultural and politically diverse cast, especially odd in a book that clearly reflects a lot of research and thought on Card's part about what Muslim nations will be like in the next century.
Diana Wynne Jones, The Crown of Dalemark: Book Four of the Dalemark Quartet features some characters from previous books, struggling to unite North and South Dalemark and end the rule of the tyrannical dukes (apparently under a hopefully non-tyrannical monarch-type person, but that's political change for you), as well as a girl from modern, mechanized Dalemark who somehow gets swept back in time to when there are no railroads and magic is very much part of people's lives. This - I wanted to like this book; I like Jones a lot. But it seemed like she'd just thrown a bunch of elements together and waited to see what happened, and the ending just cut off without resolving many of the main conflicts, which made sense for the personalities and the sense of emotional realism that Jones always delivers, but was narratively unsatisfying to me.
Christopher Rice, A Density of Souls: Three boys and one girl, best friends before they hit high school, are ripped apart and reshaped into new configurations by the politics of adolescence. Eventually, one of the boys explodes, violently, and another disappears. The girl, now an alcoholic, and the remaining boy, who is coming to accept his homosexuality, struggle to make sense of it all, along with the older brother of the missing boy. This is mostly a novel of atmosphere, though, New Orleans weather and social stratifications. I disliked the way Rice described the gay boy as having a magical pull that seemed to make everyone around him gay; maybe if I'd felt his magnetism more myself I could have bought it, but it almost seemed as if the author made him responsible for the bad things that happened by provoking desire (and thus homosexual panic) in other people.
I learned one very important thing from my most recent story: When in doubt, break furniture. Mostly my feedback is varied and singles out different parts of a story, but this time every single person who said anything specific liked the impromptu office redecoration.
Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club: Fowler, occasionally an sf writer, has gotten a lot of press for this book, which follows the lives of five women and one man who meet to discuss Jane Austen's books over the course of several months. While the club is in existence, they experience divorce, death, new love, and various other life-changing events, and it's those events that they bring to Austen. As an illustration of how no one really ever reads the same book as anyone else, the conceit works very well - and is complemented by a selection of statements about Austen from writers famous and obscure collected at the end of the book. There are some nice character descriptions, and Fowler is never heavy-handed - life events contrast to the book being read in any given month, but only in a way that reflects on both rather than creating simple parallels. As usual, I wanted more plot, where "plot" is defined as involving either aliens or murder, preferably both. Nonetheless, the book is a smooth read, a real love letter to those who love reading - with a few inside-baseball-type moments commenting on the sf world.
Stephen Dedman, Shadowsbite: The subtitle is "A Magic Noir Thriller." Yeah, Dedman wishes. There's a stuntman and a mage, and they get involved in something that has to do with vampires. I found it incoherent and uninteresting.
Christopher Golden, The Boys Are Back in Town: Right before his high school reunion, Will James gets a call from an old friend and makes plans to see him at the reunion. But when he gets there, everybody thinks the friend is dead, has been since high school, and Will suddenly has two sets of memories, one of which agrees with everybody else. Then more things start to change, always for the worse, and Will and his childhood friend might be the only ones who can stop it - if their earlier experiments with magic aren't actually the cause. While there's certainly plenty of pedestrian stuff in here, I enjoyed the plot, and there were some sharply observed moments, particularly at the reunion itself. Golden made me believe that men who hadn't seen each other in ten years but had been thicker than thieves in high school would talk exactly like this to each other.
Mildred Ames, Anna to the Infinite Power: I reread this because geekturnedvamp made me a copy of the movie, which was one of my childhood favorites. It's a YA sf novel about a not-very-nice girl who discovers that there's another girl who looks just like her and has the same name. Then she discovers that she's actually a clone of a brilliant scientist who died before finishing her most important invention, and she's being raised in conditions attempting to replicate the first Anna's - except that the first Anna was a Holocaust survivor, which might have something to do with Anna's disturbing dreams. There's also a new neighbor, a music teacher, who insists on making Anna do things that she doesn't want to; she seems to have some agenda, though the book never explains that agenda while the movie does. Both book and movie have very depressing, though somewhat different, endings - I wonder whether a similar ending would be as easy to sell today. The movie was fun for nostalgia purposes (that 80s hair!), but, as geekturnedvamp reminded me, the real charge in the movie comes from the extremely intense relationship between Anna and her brother. There's a scene that plays as nothing other than courtship - and of course Anna isn't really biologically related to her "brother," though nobody explicitly points this out. And the brother's crush on the music teacher - well, let's just say that it doesn't decrease the subtext one whit. Those things are present in the book to lesser degree (the "courtship" scene is a lot less romantic, for example), though I never noticed either one as a child.
Jeff Long, Year Zero: Graverobbing at Golgotha unleashes a deadly plague on the world. The unwitting architects of humanity's doom, meanwhile, continue to Tibet, where a literal falling-out leaves one in jail and the other free to continue his path of destruction. Meanwhile (the temptation to add "back at the ranch" is irresistable), a young genius has her genetically engineered monster ripped away from her. As the archeologist begins a monumental trek home to find his young daughter, the genius becomes a key figure in the fight against the plague, and her Frankenstein skills are employed in a desperate measure -- cloning the dead of Golgotha, one of whom just might be the Christ. The back cover plays up the Jesus angle, presumably to capture the attention of the Left Behind crowd, but it's really not like that at all. The narrative doesn't take a stand on whether the plague is really God's punishment, or just a disease from which humanity has lost its immunity, but the implausibility of the male protagonist being present at so many key moments (and what's with the Neandertal, anyhow?) argues for either divine will or authorial fiat. The woman, who is supposed to be a natural leader, at one point misses a fairly obvious indication of a horrible thing one of her adversaries is about to do, and in general we're told about her magnetism and leadership more than shown it. But you weren't looking for characterization, were you? This is an end of the world narrative, Big Death and End of Days stuff, without that pesky Left Behind conservatism. Still, the end seemed to fizzle to me; I can't say exactly why I was disappointed, especially given some of the episodes, like the refugees seeking Alaska on a ship of the damned and some trenchant observations about Americans' certainty that they will be saved. Maybe it's just that the two central characters could never quite convince me to care. Both of them start out as not very nice people -- the man a dupe and the woman/girl a Mengele in the making -- and perhaps we're supposed to think that suffering ennobles them, makes them heroes when they would have been monsters in another timeline. Certainly their actions redeem them. Am I just upset that there wasn't enough angst? Possibly. Anyway, this could probably help you survive a boring waiting room -- as long as you're not too worried about potential blasphemy.
Jonathan Kellerman, A Cold Heart: Any Alex Delaware novel is pretty much like the others. Here, the child psychologist is out of his main area of expertise, dealing with a serial killer who seems to like up-and-coming artists, while also dealing with his recent breakup with his longtime lover and a promising new relationship; those were the boring parts. Petra Connor, a female detective, and her weird new partner Eric Stahl also get a bunch of page time, introducing POVs with which Kellerman seems somewhat less confident. Both Alex and Petra think a lot about clothes and appearance, which makes sense for LA (and, I guess, for cops, but more for LA). I liked the abnormal child psychology ones better, but as airplane reading it's acceptable.
Harlan Coben, No Second Chance. Dr. Marc Seidman, shot by person or persons unknown, wakes to find his wife dead and his daughter missing. There's a ransom demand, but things go terribly wrong, and he loses yet another person. Eighteen months later, his lost love drops back into his life -- and he receives a second ransom demand. Is there a connection? And what about his former neighbor, in whose house he now lives, who keeps returning to see the place where she was horribly abused? There's enough frenetic action in this one to keep you from noticing the cardboard characterizations, and I actually liked the investigating officers, minor though their roles were. Again, airplane reading.
Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!: In need of some comfort reading last week, I picked up this Night Watch book, in which we meet a drunken Captain Sam Vimes and a young dwarf, six feet tall, newly arrived in the city to join the Night Watch. He's got a very ordinary, not magical at all sort of sword, and a birthmark; he's a human orphan, raised as a dwarf by the dwarf king; and his name is Carrot. But the story, like all the Night Watch stories, belongs to Vimes, as he is jerked out of his drunken, depressed torpor by a series of fiery deaths, apparently caused by the reappearance of dragons, long thought extinct. Indeed, the dragon has been summoned by a secret society, so that a suitable young man can slay the dragon and prove his worthiness to be king, because Ankh-Morpork hasn't had a king in a long time, and certain people think that's too bad. If you don't know Pratchett, you should, and if you do, my words are poor substitutes. I like the Night Watch books best of all the Discworld books because they feature heroes, by which I mean cranky, flawed, obstreperous, and thoroughly wonderful people who do things because they're right, not because they're easy or fun. (Also of interest here is the brief cameo by Detritus, before induction into the Watch.)
Sharon Shinn, Angelica: Shinn writes sf romances, the most successful of which are about Samaria, the planet colonized by people under the tutelage of Jovah/Yovah, the god who's a spaceship and who responds to the songs of angels by providing what the people need. This novel takes us back, earlier in the history of Samaria than the initial trilogy, to the time of Gaaron, an Archangel-to-be who is instructed by the god to take Susannah, a nomad woman, as his wife. Susannah isn't thrilled about leaving her lover and her tribe for life inside the rock eyrie of the angels, and Gaaron has other troubles - his rebellious half-sister at home and, even worse, the obliteration of small settlements by mysterious forces wielding devastating weapons. The characters, annoying and sympathetic, are all doing their best by their own lights - no evil overlords here, just real conflict - and I really liked the romance because there were real divisions between Susannah and Gaaron, cultural and perhaps gendered divisions that weren't easily resolved. They had some misunderstandings, but they weren't silly about them - they actually talked, though they didn't always agree at the end of the conversations and they didn't even always clear up those misunderstandings. I was rooting for them, and Shinn delivered a satisfying conclusion without any emotional shortcuts; while the sf part of the plot was more mechanical, I remain interested in Samaria and its god-fearing people.
Linda Nagata, The Bohr Maker: coffee_and_ink turned me on to Nagata. This is my first book of hers, but it won't be the last. The Bohr Maker is a genetic - well, virus comes close; a person carrying the Bohr Maker can do things to her own and others' bodies, reshaping them, controlling their emotions, etc. For this reason, the Bohr Maker is banned by the world government, which stringently controls all genetic modification technology. Nikko, a genetically modified space-dweller whose modification is now illegal and who is going to die because of that, plots to get the Bohr Maker, but through a series of mishaps it ends up with Phousita, an illiterate slum-dweller in Asia. Chased relentlessly by the police, including a real Dragon Lady who likes to torment Nikko, Phousita, Nikko, and Nikko's brother must figure out how to survive. The Dragon Lady is an annoying character, since we never get any insight into why she's such a raging bitch and so she comes off as a plot device with big flashing arrows saying "hate me; hope I get my comeuppance." But Phousita is an interesting and unusual character. Even though her transformation is more told than shown, and even though the Bohr Maker suffers from the Superman problem of being able to do almost anything, which is rough on narrative tension, it's such a fascinating journey that I was forgiving.
Orson Scott Card, Shadow Puppets: Another novel in Card's Ender Wiggins universe, this one focusing on Bean and his inamorata Petra as they attempt to survive the machinations of the psychotic Achilles. This book was pretty much spoiled for me by Card's gender/sexuality theories. Everyone - no matter their cultural backgrounds - seems to agree that the job of a man is to father children and the job of a woman to mother, that these are very different jobs, that this is the highest goal to which anyone can aspire, even those who have in earlier life saved the world, and that there is no rational reason to think otherwise. Now, it's not that this is an implausible viewpoint - my sister seems to hold it, so I know there exist people like this. What is implausible is that everyone in Card's world, from the German homosexual scientist to the various kids from around the world who were part of Ender Wiggin's jeesh, finds this self-evident (with the brief exception of Bean, before he capitulates, despite the fact that nobody has actually answered his legitimate objections to this position - his genes guarantee a short and painful life for any child of his in whom they're dominant -- and despite the fact that Petra deliberately disregards his wishes with regard to reproduction, leading to a series of events that somebody should have seen as disastrous rather than just another damn thing to deal with). This is poor characterization of a nominally multicultural and politically diverse cast, especially odd in a book that clearly reflects a lot of research and thought on Card's part about what Muslim nations will be like in the next century.
Diana Wynne Jones, The Crown of Dalemark: Book Four of the Dalemark Quartet features some characters from previous books, struggling to unite North and South Dalemark and end the rule of the tyrannical dukes (apparently under a hopefully non-tyrannical monarch-type person, but that's political change for you), as well as a girl from modern, mechanized Dalemark who somehow gets swept back in time to when there are no railroads and magic is very much part of people's lives. This - I wanted to like this book; I like Jones a lot. But it seemed like she'd just thrown a bunch of elements together and waited to see what happened, and the ending just cut off without resolving many of the main conflicts, which made sense for the personalities and the sense of emotional realism that Jones always delivers, but was narratively unsatisfying to me.
Christopher Rice, A Density of Souls: Three boys and one girl, best friends before they hit high school, are ripped apart and reshaped into new configurations by the politics of adolescence. Eventually, one of the boys explodes, violently, and another disappears. The girl, now an alcoholic, and the remaining boy, who is coming to accept his homosexuality, struggle to make sense of it all, along with the older brother of the missing boy. This is mostly a novel of atmosphere, though, New Orleans weather and social stratifications. I disliked the way Rice described the gay boy as having a magical pull that seemed to make everyone around him gay; maybe if I'd felt his magnetism more myself I could have bought it, but it almost seemed as if the author made him responsible for the bad things that happened by provoking desire (and thus homosexual panic) in other people.